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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29901357">The Art of Driving</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bunn1cula/pseuds/Bunn1cula'>Bunn1cula</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Blake's 7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alcohol, Bittersweet Ending, Bittersweet Reunion, Cunnilingus, F/M, GPSC zine, Post Star One, Pre Gauda Prime</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 18:40:51</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>12,274</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29901357</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bunn1cula/pseuds/Bunn1cula</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Years after the Andromedan War, Jenna Stannis finds a very different Roj Blake on Gauda Prime.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Roj Blake/Jenna Stannis</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>The House Always Sins</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Art of Driving</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Originally published in the 2021 Blake's 7 fanzine <i>The House Always Sins</i>.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>
    <strong>You’ve been driving way too fast</strong>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em> <strong>You’ve been pushing way too hard</strong> </em>
</p><p>
  <em> <strong>You’ve been taking things too far</strong> </em>
</p><p>
  <em> <strong>Who do you think you are?</strong> </em>
</p><p>
  <em> <strong>-Black Box Recorder</strong> </em>
</p><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p><p>It was him.</p><p>Twenty-six months and god knew how many light years had passed between them, and there he was. Scabby and scarred, looking like a one-eyed highwayman. Heavier, as though all his accumulated sins and guilts had caught up to him, weighing him down and bloating him up. Or maybe it was the clothes.</p><p>Despite the soft round of his belly pushing against a wide leather belt, and the gentler slope of his shoulders, he looked hard. Hands on his hips, just as he’d done on the <em> Liberator </em>flight deck, telling people what to do with inherent authority, still ever the leader... though not perhaps a totally benevolent one. The people around him did as he directed but they avoided his gaze, limited their contact, quickly turned to their tasks and away from him.</p><p>Nothing, in fact, like the <em> Liberator </em>flight deck.</p><p>Still, there was no doubt. She had finally found Roj Blake.</p><p>She’d long anticipated that this moment, if it ever came to be, would overwhelm her emotions. She’d forbidden herself to cry, though she’d known it would take a force wall to hold back the tears she’d always imagined would stream down her face at the sight of him and make her look an awful mess.</p><p>Instead, the one looking a mess was him, and inside her was only a strange calm. It was mere matter of fact that he was standing there, metres away; that all it would take to bring him back into her life would be to say his name in a normal speaking voice: <em>Blake</em>. Just like that. Not, <em>Blake, I loved you once and would have done anything for you and given you anything and followed you anywhere, but now I don’t know what I feel anymore; it doesn’t feel like love any longer, now that you are here.</em></p><p>And now, after all this time, perhaps she didn’t need to do this, to bring him back into her life. She’d done better without him, without any of them; she had her own ship, her own people, her own money. Her own life. Just as she’d had before her arrest, before the <em> London </em> , before Roj <em>fucking</em> Blake.</p><p>She nearly turned on her heel to leave when her last look at him caught his moving gaze. He froze, jaw slightly agape, and his good eye looked to nearly bulge from his head. She could see his lips quiver from where she stood.</p><p>“Jenna!”</p><p>He came toward her, faster than she’d anticipated his big frame could move now, and in an instant he had her hands in his. They were rough and dirty, like a labourer’s. She fleetingly wondered if he still chewed on his fingers when he thought something over.</p><p>“Jenna,” he said again, his face breaking into the closest expression of joy she’d ever seen on him, and he pulled her into a firm embrace. He smelled of wood smoke and sweat, pine resin, gun oil. Not an especially pleasant combination, but she was not repelled. Somewhere under all that, he still smelled like Blake.</p><p>He loosened his hold on her and she stepped back, running her hands from his shoulders to the patch of his chest bared by his loose shirt. She patted him lightly there before dropping her hands back to her sides. Her fingertips were sticky with his sweat and she resisted the urge to wipe them on her trousers.</p><p>He reached forward, touched her neck, brushed a lock of her hair from her shoulder.</p><p>“Is it really you?”</p><p>“Yes,” she said. “I’m afraid it really is.”</p><p>He squeezed her shoulders. “I can’t believe it, <em>Jenna</em>... this is wonderful.” Then he looked past her, around the cargo bay, as if finding his bearings after a reverie. “But why are you here, of all places? Surely not for business; there’s no worthwhile trade going on here now... not unless you’ve changed careers.”</p><p>“Well, I’m not here for pleasure.”</p><p>“Thank god, I never figured you for that sort of perverse.”</p><p>“There’s a lot you don’t know about me. Especially now.”</p><p>His smile slipped and he dropped his hands from her arms. “Yes, I’m sure that’s true. And a lot of that not knowing is my fault, I know that, too.”</p><p>“Please don’t flog your guilt, Blake. Not here, not now.”</p><p>He squinted thoughtfully at her for a moment, then hooked his thumbs into his belt. “How long will you be staying?”</p><p>“I... don’t know,” she said truthfully. “I’m not sure what I need is here or not.”</p><p>“Can I help?”</p><p>“Maybe.”</p><p>He didn’t ask her anything else. Smart of him.</p><p>“I’ll be done here in about an hour. If you’d like, you can meet me in the canteen. Someone will direct you if you can’t find it.”</p><p>She smiled cooly, unsure now of her intentions. She needed to think. She left him to head back to her ship. Whether it was to wait or not she didn’t yet know.</p><p> </p><p>***</p><p> </p><p>Minutes after the startup sequence had completed, her index finger still rested on the ignition button. Normally, Wyn would have been calculating the most viable path through the blockade while Neko made a final check of the manifests (one legit, one not). But they weren’t here. Not this time.</p><p>Cursing, she switched everything back off and the smooth whine of the engines sighed and went silent. Resentment curled in her gut like a snake.</p><p>Two years. Two <em>years</em> without any contact from the <em> Liberator </em>. Avon she couldn’t really begrudge; they’d never much liked each other, possibly because they were a little too alike and it disturbed the both of them to see their reflections in the other. Vila was Vila and had probably just stayed on the ride for as long as it would have him. Jenna didn’t know about Cally. She’d have expected Cally would insist they look for her, and for Blake, but whether this had been the case or not was pointless to wonder about now.</p><p>Cally was gone, it had been reported. <em> Liberator </em>was gone. Blake was gone.</p><p>Except here he was, on Gauda Prime.</p><p> </p><p>***</p><p> </p><p>The canteen, more like a converted storage room than a mess hall, seemed to be at the tail end of a midday meal rush. She found Blake, a bit more cleaned up, sitting in the farthest corner at the end of a long table across from a ginger-haired man who seemed rather bothered about something. Blake was regarding him flatly while sipping on a steaming mug of something that smelled like cinnamon and cigarette ashes.</p><p>He caught sight of her as she approached and the smile he gave her was so presumptively generous that it put her right off.</p><p>“Found you,” she said, one hand instinctively coming to rest on her gun hip.</p><p>The ginger-haired man faced her, his long, feathery fringe dropping over his right eye, and where she would have expected the usual up-and-down eye rake, he instead appraised her in a rather diagnostic fashion that was even more unsettling.</p><p>“Deva, this is Jenna. Jenna, Deva,” Blake introduced them. “Jenna is an old friend. And Deva,” he said to Jenna, “is a newer one.”</p><p>“Pleased,” said Jenna curtly. “May I sit down?”</p><p>“I’m going,” said Deva, in an accent as crisp as his white technician’s shirt. He collected a handheld device from the table as he stood and gestured to Blake with it. “And yes, I am your friend so remember what I said, you damned fool. It’s not worth the trouble.”</p><p>Blake grinned cagily. “Goodbye, Deva.”</p><p>Jenna took Deva’s place at the table. “He seems a little soft for this place.”</p><p>“Thankfully, I’m not using him for muscle.”</p><p>“He’s a strange one. Like Avon, somehow, but... defanged.”</p><p>Blake laughed. “Deva’s all right. He’s a rather bad habit of watching my back instead of stabbing it.”</p><p>Jenna narrowed her eyes, suddenly piqued. “Avon held the line, you know. He held them back and kept us all alive. If it weren’t for him, we’d all be molecules floating in Sector Eleven.” She had no idea why she had felt the unexpected need to defend Avon, who probably never in his life had asked for nor needed it.</p><p>Blake’s smile eroded and his eyes hooded. “Yes, I do know. Avon saved us all.” His mouth twisted through the words.</p><p>Jenna ran a hand through her hair, suddenly very tired. “Look, I don’t know why he didn’t come back for us, either. I... don’t think I even want to know why anymore.”</p><p>“I, for one, didn’t want him to. To find me, I mean,” said Blake, leaning back.</p><p>Jenna frowned. “How do you mean?”</p><p>“I didn’t want anyone to.”</p><p>The exiting miners were making a din, their boots scraping the floor. She must not have heard him right. “Blake... I — what are you saying?”</p><p>“I didn’t <em>want</em> to come back.”</p><p>Oh. <em>Oh</em>.</p><p>Her face stung from the invisible slap of his words. She wanted to rail at him. Shout at him, hit him. Make him understand how much it hurt. How selfish he was. How wrong. How very, <em>very</em> wrong.</p><p>Her eyes pricked and burned. God damn it. This wasn’t happening like she’d wanted. Not at all. There was no relief in being so angry with him, no closure. This was not catharsis and it certainly was no redemption.</p><p>Blake bowed his head as if he were asking for penance. “Jenna, I know,” he said, “and I am sorry.”</p><p>The gall of those words made bile rise in her throat. “You know <em>what</em>, exactly? What are you sorry for, Blake?”</p><p>“For everything. All of it.”</p><p>She shook her head. “You don’t get off that easy. You don’t get to just... issue some blanket apology and expect to enjoy some kind of general approval afterwards. You certainly won’t get mine that easily. If you even actually want it.”</p><p>“Jenna!” he hissed, jerking forward and taking her arm in his hand. “Why are you so angry? What have <em>I</em> done to you?”</p><p>Her face was scorching, a boiler about to blow. She knew she had to be as scarlet as one of Servalan’s most garish numbers and she choked back a furious sob. They must have had the attention of the few nearby diners left by now.</p><p>“I realise now that all the time I spent thinking they’d — <em>we’d</em> — left you...” She laughed bitterly. “All that time was a waste of regret... because and in the end it was really <em>you</em> who’d left <em>us</em>.”</p><p>His expression went deadly serious. “No, Jenna. No. That’s not it.”</p><p>“Of course it is,” she spat, flinging his hand from her arm. “It’s the truth of it, isn’t it? You just said you didn’t want to come back.”</p><p>“Let me explain—”</p><p>“You’re a bastard, Blake. There’s no need to explain that.”</p><p>“Now you sound like Avon.”</p><p>“Avon was right about most things.”</p><p>Blake barked a rueful laugh. “That’s the truth, as well.”</p><p>She wanted to gouge out his other eye with his fork. “Since you think this is so funny, I’ll just leave you to it.”</p><p>When she moved to stand, he slapped a heavy hand over hers and pressed it to the table. </p><p>“Don’t go.”</p><p>“Stop touching me!” She yanked her hand out from under his and twisted sideways on the bench to get up.</p><p>“Please?”</p><p>Just as she’d decided to leave him there and get the hell off this planet, she made the mistake of looking at him. His expression was so plaintive, so piteously vulnerable, she had a reflexive desire to bring her hand to his face and cradle his stubbled cheek.</p><p>Fuck. How did he do that? How was he able to just look at her, look <em>into</em> her, and seduce her into happily impaling herself right back onto his bloody hook? It was infuriating and insulting and masterfully manipulative and by god, she felt atrocious about it but she heard herself say:</p><p>“You have five minutes.”</p><p>“Ten and a beer?”</p><p>“Fuck you, Blake. Ten and a beer. And no more.”</p><p> </p><p>***</p><p> </p><p>He brought his flyer down in a small clearing beside a small, dilapidated shack. They’d flown over nothing but trees and more trees for miles, and the area was so forlorn and remote that not for the first time, Jenna wondered if she’d made a mistake coming with him. She didn’t know this Blake, and didn’t entirely trust him. Her instinct for detecting deception had always been dead on, and she wasn’t going to start doubting herself now.</p><p>Still, she slid out of the passenger seat of the flyer, checked her holster, and followed him into the crumbling little cabin.</p><p>Inside, it was dark and cold. And, like everything else on this planet, filthy. She tried not to touch anything.</p><p>“When you said ‘a beer’ I expected to drink it somewhere at least structurally sound.”</p><p>“It’s safe,” he said, crossing the room to what appeared to be a simple kitchenette. “It’s under a heat signature scrambler. Can’t be detected from the air. The only way anyone can find this place is on foot, and there isn’t anyone out here for miles. Even the brigands don’t make it out this far.” He reached into a cabinet and retrieved a pack of six bottles.</p><p>“I said <em>one</em> beer, Blake.”</p><p>“For <em>you</em>.” He handed her one bottle and tucked the rest beneath his arm. “I don’t recall saying anything about me.” He unscrewed the cap on his first bottle and took a long swig.</p><p>“Apologies for the state of my little place. You caught me in the midst of redecorating.” He moved to the middle of the room, lowered himself to the dusty hardwood floor and sat cross-legged with the pack of beer in front of him as if it were a campfire. He gestured for her to join him on the other side of the bottles.</p><p>She rolled her eyes and followed suit. The beer was warm and a little flat but she wasn’t there to be picky about it.</p><p>“Ten minutes were up long ago, you know.”</p><p>“Time didn’t start till the first drink,” he said lightly. “House rules.”</p><p>“Very generous calling this a house.”</p><p>He shrugged. “It serves its purpose.”</p><p>“Which is?”</p><p>For a second, he looked as thought he might actually tell her something useful, but then he only smiled cryptically. “At the moment, somewhere to be with you alone — for when you murder me. The body’d never be found here. I went through an awful lot of trouble to keep you away from Cygnus Alpha only for you to end up there after all.”</p><p>“I see.” She took another pull on the beer. Her belly started to warm. “You think I’ve come all this way to kill you?”</p><p>“Well, you certainly don’t look as though you want to kiss me.”</p><p>She stared at him. He still had that same big, sensuous mouth, the same full and tender-looking lips she’d often imagined greedily tasting her, consuming her, each touch of his tongue a whispered secret shared only with her.</p><p>“That ship has flown,” she said, looking away. “At time-distort ten.” He may have looked a little disappointed at that, or maybe it was a quirk of this new face of his she hadn’t yet gotten used to.</p><p>“Would have been a doomed ride, anyway. I’m a terrible passenger.”</p><p>“You’ve never been only a <em>passenger</em>, Blake, not in your entire life. Not on the <em> London </em> , not on Earth, certainly not on <em> Liberator </em>.”</p><p>“Oh, there were times—”</p><p>“When you were mind wiped, yes. Good lord, Blake — <em>that’s</em> what it took to neutralise you. And you fought your way out of even that. You’re a leader, and you always have been, so drop the bystander act. It’s a lie.” She tipped her bottle and forced back a mouthful of bitter suds.</p><p>Hunched over, he sipped his own beer, quiet for a moment, staring at the floor. His fingers worked at the label on his bottle.</p><p>“And don’t you dare feel sorry for yourself,” she drilled him again, wanting to drive the words through his soft middle like a spear.</p><p>“Well, why not?” he hissed, his face distorted in disgust. “I never wanted to be in charge! Never wanted the responsibility. I only did it because none of the rest of you could — or would.”</p><p>“And that went for the Freedom Party as well, then?”</p><p>Wearily, he put a hand on his forehead. “Jenna... I’m <em>not</em> a leader. I have no interest whatsoever in authority. It’s just that I’ve never been able to stand by and ignore bad things happening around me. It’s too painful. I just... <em>see</em> in my mind the way things should be. Not only that things can be better, but <em>how</em> they can be better, and the way we can get there. I don’t know how else to put it other than it feels like some kind of... duty to act.”</p><p>“Which, again, does in fact make you a leader.” She ignored his sour expression. “Blake, what are you even doing here?”</p><p>“Living,” he said pointedly, not meeting her eyes.</p><p>She snorted. “If that’s what you call it.”</p><p>“I do, actually. For the first time in my life, I am my own man.” He popped open a second bottle. “I’m not running headlong toward suicide any longer. The only cause I answer to now is money. I am living for <em>me</em>.”</p><p>“When did you and Avon switch bodies?”</p><p>“Oh, something tells me Avon is still very much Avon.”</p><p>“Probably.” But she’d read things, heard rumours that pointed otherwise, to some strange and contradictory version of Kerr Avon she’d never known before. Some scalene hybrid, perhaps, of the three of them. She didn’t know what to think of it, other than perhaps Avon was losing his marbles, or on some doomed ride himself.</p><p>The shadows in the room had gotten long. Blake’s face was harder to make out, silhouetted as he was against the dimming light filtering between the trees and through the window.</p><p>Jenna finished her beer and set the empty bottle on the floor beside her. “I’m not staying here after dark, Blake. I want to know what happened to you. And then I want you to take me back to my ship. If you don’t, I’ll take your flyer myself and leave you here.”</p><p>“Mind if I shed some literal light on the matter first? I’d like to be able to see that face of yours after all these years without it.”</p><p>He pushed himself up, bottle in hand, and went to another cupboard where he retrieved a lantern. It was old military issue, rusty and rickety-looking, as much a relic from bygone conflicts as Blake seemed to be now.</p><p>He switched it on and folded himself back into a seated position on the floor, arms resting on his bent knees. He lazily swung the bottle in one hand between them. “If you want to know why I never... well, responded to you, to your interest, I mean—”</p><p>“I don’t. That’s not at all what I am asking you right now.”</p><p>“Oh.”</p><p>“I am asking why you disappeared on purpose. Why you didn’t want to come back.”</p><p>He grunted. “That’s not as easy to answer as the other thing.”</p><p>That stung, but she didn’t let it show. She wondered again if he was misleading her, but if he was, he was going about it very skillfully.</p><p>“Try.”</p><p>“I...” he started, then sighed. He brought his beer bottle back to his lips and mouthed it, tapped it lightly with his teeth. A lantern-lit wet sheen glinted on his tongue as he teased it, open-mouthed, through the bottle opening and back out again. It was ludicrously distracting.</p><p>“Stop that, Blake.”</p><p>“What?” He stared at her stupidly for a moment before glancing at the bottle in his hand, a sheepish look coming over him. “Oh. Sorry.” His expression warmed. If she wasn’t mistaken, he was a little too bloody pleased with her reaction. “It’s just something... when I’m thinking—”</p><p>“—you have a raging oral fixation, yes, we’d all noticed,” she coldly finished for him.</p><p>“Really? All of you?”</p><p>“Especially Avon.”</p><p>He choked out an incredulous laugh. “I’m <em>sorry</em>?”</p><p>Perhaps that had been too much. She’d really been punching him up, and that one had landed well below the belt. “Never mind.”</p><p>“I’m sure I don’t wish to know what <em>that</em> was meant to be about.”</p><p>“Look — forget I said that. I just feel you’re intentionally trying to throw me off, and I’m losing my patience.” She rubbed a hand over her chin, hard, forgetting about the dirt. “I don’t have a lot of time, Blake. I’m not even supposed to be here.”</p><p>She knew he wanted to know what she meant about Avon, but he was too cagey, too proud, to ask. Now that was the same old Blake.</p><p>He eyed her shrewdly, and twisted his mouth into a deep frown. “All right. Here’s your answer: I was a failure. I failed you, I failed Avon, and Cally, and Vila. And Gan — Christ, especially Gan. Every damned last one of you.</p><p>“It took the bloody Federation to clean up the mess after Star One. The <em>Federation</em>, Jenna — there is no worse thing I can imagine. I didn’t deserve <em> Liberator </em>, and I didn’t deserve any of you. So I did everyone a favor and removed myself. Permanently.” He grimaced, upended his bottle, and drained it.</p><p>“And yet here we are.”</p><p>“And <em>yet</em>,” he spat. He rolled the bottle into a far off corner where it clinked noisily into the cobwebbed recess.</p><p>“Do you know what I think?” Jenna asked, leaning back onto one hand and crossing her legs out in front of her. “I think you’re rubbish at pretending to be dead. Either that or you wanted to be found.”</p><p>“Dead?” he laughed. “Who said I was dead?”</p><p>“Spacelane scuttlebutt. The grapevine is buzzier than ever. It’s got your bones scattered everywhere from Jevron to beneath some dreamhead brothel on Space City — which is the only story I believed, mind you.”</p><p>“Well, you have always been the one to see the best in me.”</p><p>She rolled her eyes and smiled crookedly at him. Memories threatened to surge unwanted sentiment into her heart, onto her face. Steadfastly, she pushed it all back into the unresectable rubbish bin that latched itself beneath her sternum. “That’s actually a bit too true to be funny.”</p><p>He rubbed a finger over his mouth, unsuccessfully stifling a burgeoning smile. Christ, she chided herself, what a thing to say to him out loud. If she said anything else like that, he may put that big damned grin back on from the canteen (from the flight deck, from the teleport room, from the crew room over coffee and the closest thing to fried eggs they’d been able to program into the food generator) and she’d be done for.</p><p>“I don’t deserve it, Jenna. I haven’t for a long time.” The grin faded from his face like the quickly dimming light from the window.</p><p>“You’re not going to trick me into telling you anything else nice. You still haven’t properly answered my question. Now hand over another beer and tell me what happened to your face.”</p><p>He did as she asked. Unsurprisingly, it had been someone he shouldn’t have trusted, a situation he should not have been in. He’d ignored his gut and nearly lost his innards as a result. Now, he claimed, he knew better. He had a scar, and a system.</p><p>Her mouth tasted malty, her tongue heavy. She spoke carefully so that he would not know she was starting to feel the alcohol. “Why didn’t you fix it?”</p><p>“Very little point these days. In fact, it probably helps with the job. I also quite enjoy the irony of nearly losing the same eye I put out of Travis’ head. It’s a bit of a striking joke on the universe’s part.”</p><p>“What job?”</p><p>“Oh, I’ve been working as a... sort of judicial adjunct, shall we say.”</p><p>Cold tendrils wrapped themselves around one another in her chest. Gauda Prime — a planet full of dirty outlaws with a new accord in place to clean house before inviting the Federation over. Slow, icy realisation frosted through her veins as she put the formerly unrecognisable pieces together.</p><p>“So it’s true.”</p><p>“What is?”</p><p>“You’re a bounty hunter.”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>In no universe did this make sense. Jenna did not, could not understand. There could be no sane explanation for this, none whatsoever.</p><p>The last Jenna had seen, she still had a Federation price on her head in the mid-six figures. And she was sitting on the floor in an abandoned shack in the middle of nowhere on a lawless planet across from a bounty hunter.</p><p>“What the fuck, Blake!” She leapt to her feet, knocking her beer over in the process. She grabbed the gun in her holster and pointed it at him. “Did you take me here to sell me?”</p><p>Blake stared up at her in pop-eyed shock from where he still sat on the floor, raising his hands in stunned disbelief. “What? No!”</p><p>“I don’t believe you,” she said, her voice quavering. Her aim on his center mass, however, remained steady. “If you have anyone outside waiting to help you bag me, you should know I have a detonator where I can get at it just as easily as this gun.”</p><p>Slowly, he stood, keeping his hands up near his head. “I would never, Jenna, <em>never</em> do that to you. I would never betray you.”</p><p>“Oh, I’ll bet. Just like you’d never take any fees from the Federation. Tell me, if I searched you now, would I find a Security Agency-issue weapon on you?”</p><p>With deliberate slowness, he reached one hand into the back of his waistband and pulled out a small gun. He bent his knees until he could reach out enough to gingerly place it on the floor, then straightened himself, keeping eye contact with her through each motion. He obeyed when she gestured for him to kick the gun to her.</p><p>Keeping her own gun trained on him, she scooped it up in one swift move and turned it over to examine. A Rekter PK12. Old. Not Federation. She tucked it in her jacket opposite where she wore her own gun.</p><p>“That’s it?”</p><p>“That’s it,” he asserted. “I have a plasma rifle in the flyer behind the front passenger seat. You won’t find anything else.”</p><p>“That’s not much firepower for someone in your line of work.”</p><p>He nodded in agreement. “I didn’t think I’d need it. There’s much more back at base. I’d be happy to show you.”</p><p>Who <em>was</em> this strange shadow standing in front of her? Neither the light from the lantern nor his words were enough to satisfactorily illuminate who or what he had become.</p><p>“I’m not going anywhere with you. I’m taking your flyer and leaving you. It turns out there is nothing here for me after all.”</p><p>“Jenna, please.” He lurched forward and grabbed her by the shoulders when she took a step toward the door. “Don’t go.”</p><p>She wriggled hard but his grip tightened and kept her in place. She tried pushing him but he didn’t budge.</p><p><em>“Let go of me,”</em> she seethed between clenched teeth.</p><p>“I want to explain — I <em>need</em> to explain to you what I’m doing. I’m not what you think. I...” His words trailed off and his face tilted downward as he noticed her gun shoved against his pelvis. Wisely, he let her go.</p><p>“Blake, I swear to god if you touch me one more time without my permission I will shoot you.”</p><p>“All right, Jenna, all right.”</p><p>She brushed back hair that had fallen into her eyes with the hand that wasn’t holding the gun and glared at him murderously. If he moved so much as an inch to one side, she knew without a doubt she would shoot him until he stopped moving, permanently.</p><p>“For god’s sake, I’m sorry. Please—” The one direction she did not expect him to move was down, yet there he went, lowering himself to a kneeling position in front of her. “Please stay. I am begging you, Jenna. Please listen to me.”</p><p>Looking down at him in this position was simultaneously gratifying and appalling. If they’d been in public she’d have been too shocked and embarrassed than to do anything but leave.</p><p>But they weren’t in public. They were alone. And Blake was on his knees, willingly powerless. She felt an unexpected warmth between her legs.</p><p>Oh, no. Oh, <em>no</em>.</p><p>“Blake, get up.”</p><p>“Will you listen to me?”</p><p>“Yes, just get up,” she barked.</p><p>Lumbering slightly, with more effort — or less adrenaline — than when he’d stood after putting the gun on the floor, he brought himself up to his full height. A light sheen of sweat beaded his forehead just below the hairline that hadn’t receded at all over the years, though the surrounding dark curls were now speckled with grey.</p><p>The deep open collar of his shirt revealed a generous bit of the smooth chest she recalled trying not to look at whenever he’d padded half-dressed onto the flight deck some nights with vague, yawning excuses of needing Orac or Zen for something he claimed couldn’t wait until morning. Blake had never slept much then, and Jenna used to enjoy his unexpected company at whatever dark and lonely hour he’d stir and come to spend with her on her night watches. She may have had it bad for him then, but in all fairness, Blake was a charmer and a natural conversationalist. He had a way of really <em>listening</em> and then being able to share interesting ideas and a thoughtful opinion without trying to make his input seem more important than hers, which Jenna knew was a bloody rare thing to find in a man.</p><p>At least, that’s how it had been in those hours when it was just the two of them. When the others were around, Avon especially, it was a no-holds-barred clash of wills no matter the subject. And near the end, around Star One, the hair-trigger tension between them all had become untenably taut. Had the war not split them all up, something would have eventually broken; whether it would have been their collective working relationship or Avon’s face, she couldn’t guess, though she’d liked to have been the one to make the choice.</p><p>Jenna did not stand for power struggles on her own ship. She expected nothing but full cooperation from her crew, and they willingly gave it to her. She didn’t demand subordination — she’d never want that — but she would certainly brook no Avons on her flight deck. She was a good captain. Firm, but always fair, and Wyn and Neko acted in an accordingly dutiful manner. They did as she asked, without any annoying obstreperousness or dissent.</p><p>Which, if she wasn’t hallucinating, was exactly what Blake was doing at this very moment. Which, if it wasn’t the beer, was making her even warmer and a little lightheaded. She blinked away the reveries.</p><p>“Enough games. What is it you want to tell me?”</p><p>He dropped his hands slowly and let them come to rest loosely on his hips.</p><p>“I may have been down for a while but I’m not out.”</p><p>“Of what? Soap?”</p><p>He made a face. “Let off, Jenna. I just got back this afternoon from two days of tracking in abandoned mines. I wasn’t exactly expecting a reunion with you, of all people, before I could nip off for a shower.”</p><p>“If you had expected me, you’d have at least tried to look somewhat respectable?” A crooked smile crept across her mouth.</p><p>“I’d even have shaved.”</p><p>She laughed despite herself and slipped her gun back into its holster on her hip. “But you’re being honest here, Blake. Remember?”</p><p>“Right.” He returned her grin, dropping his shoulders in relief once her gun was safely put away. “The truth is that I haven’t really given up, despite what I wanted you to think earlier. I mean,” he gestured to the spot they’d been sitting at around the lantern, and she consented to rejoin him there, “what I told you <em>was</em> the truth for a long time. But not now.” He grunted as he sat but continued, “As I said, I can’t just stand by. There <em>are</em> honest men and women out there, and I <em>have</em> met them, and they deserve to be free.</p><p>“It’s not much yet, but I have the beginnings of an organisation. Deva, who you met earlier, he’s a big part. In fact, he and a few other people have been the ones to really make me find myself again, to see myself again as I should be. Not as... well, what you see right now.”</p><p>“I’m confused. I thought you were a bounty hunter. Are you or aren’t you?”</p><p>“I know I haven’t exactly been transparent with you until now and that nothing is clear. It probably won’t even sound sane when I explain it, but I’ll try: I am hunting fugitives, and I am still fighting the Federation, but the two activities aren’t mutually exclusive.”</p><p>“You’re right, this doesn’t sound at all sane.”</p><p>“The bounties are good money. And in a way, it’s honest money — the people I collect are genuine bad actors, Jenna. This place is even more lousy with rapists and murderers than Cygnus Alpha, and believe you me, the universe is better off without them around.”</p><p>“I’m guessing you’re going to tell me you use the money to fund your rebellion.”</p><p>“Well, yes.”</p><p>“And how many people know you’re Roj Blake?”</p><p>“Not many,” he admitted.</p><p>“But obviously enough for me to get some idea that you might be here.”</p><p>“Obviously.”</p><p>“I wonder if Avon knows.”</p><p>“He may, especially if he still has Orac. But he doesn’t care. If he’d been searching, he’d have detected something by now.”</p><p>“Maybe he has.”</p><p>Blake smiled faintly. Sadly. “It’s no use, Jenna; Avon’s not coming. There’s nothing for him here but needless trouble and he must know it.”</p><p>She mirrored his expression and watched him pick up a bottle and peel at the label again without drinking from it. She didn’t know what it had been exactly between Blake and Avon, but it was something more complex than their being simple friends or adversaries. It wasn’t even something in between the two polar relationships, or even some bizarre combination of the two. They were like two parts of something that had the potential to be a great whole, if only they could just slide harmoniously into place. Instead, it was like they attracted one another so powerfully that they could only collide into mutual annihilation. The potential energy was incredible, but ultimately destructive, and it had been a little frightening to watch from the outside. Surely many of their successes and survivals were owed to Avon’s quick thinking and intellect, but once his effect on Blake’s moods and judgement had become detrimental, Jenna had wished once and for all that she’d left Avon on Cygnus Alpha when he’d suggested they do the same to Blake.</p><p>“You don’t need him,” she said decisively. “You’re better off without him.”</p><p>Blake shrugged. “I don’t know. You’re probably right, but sometimes I can’t help but wonder what it would be like for us all to be working for the same goal together again.”</p><p>“You and Avon were <em>never</em> working for the same goal, Blake. You wanted completely opposite things — you wanted to help others, while he only wanted to help himself. I know you know this, and I shouldn’t need to even say it.”</p><p>Blake calmly met her exasperated gaze. “Then why did he stay, when he had so many chances to leave? Why did he always ultimately choose to help me?”</p><p>Jenna shook her head. “I absolutely cannot speak even one word for Avon. He’s a cunning bastard — always has been, always will be. He’s got his own reasons for everything and I refuse to waste even a minute trying to work out what they are, much less <em>why</em> they are.”</p><p>She paused. Maybe she was being too harsh. She may have come to resent Avon (for taking the <em> Liberator </em>, for taking Blake, and cavalierly wrecking them both) but Blake clearly didn’t and she tried to force herself to respect this, but also felt the need to help him past it because it was a waste; of his time, his attention, his potency. She tried to soften her expression and her tone.</p><p>“Forget him, Blake. Forget the past. This is now. Use your energy for <em>this</em> time, and the future. “</p><p>He smiled wistfully. “You know, it’s a hard thing to ask me to willingly forget what little I remember in the first place. I find I want to hold onto every memory I’ve managed to make of my own, good or bad, because nearly everything else before that is either erased, or a lie. For a long time, I couldn’t reliably differentiate which memories I had were real and which ones weren’t. But things are clearer now, and I know which ones have <em>truly</em> made me who I am. I’m afraid to lose that, Jenna, because it is my sense of reality — it’s... <em>me</em>. If it means replaying all of my mistakes and regrets over and over in my mind then it’s still worth it. Because it’s all the truth.”</p><p>Jenna stilled. She knew it was, too.</p><p>He’d hit her squarely in her weakest spot for him, she realised in dismay. The juxtaposition of his damaged mind and memories with his preposterously full, idealistic heart took her out every time. She wanted to take him into her arms and thread her fingers through his hair and touch a thumb to his lips and take them into hers. She wanted his big, workmanlike hands on her body. She wanted his heat inside her, wanted to fuck all the sadness and hurt and regret out of him. To burn some of their stockpiled pain away for even just a single moment.</p><p>Instead, she told him, “Remembering the past is one thing. Being mired in it is another.”</p><p>“Is that what you think, that I’m mired?” he asked, setting down his bottle. “If <em>you’ll</em> take a turn at being honest.”</p><p>“That wasn’t necessarily the agreement,” she said, “but I suppose it’s only fair.” She tilted her head to the side and looked him up and down. “When I look at you, I see someone that could be doing a hell of a lot better for himself. <em>Should</em> be.”</p><p>“Which means?”</p><p>“You’re a mess, Blake.”</p><p>“Really. And here I thought I’d been pulling out all the stops for you.”</p><p>That made her laugh. “I’ve been to nicer Delta slums than this, and with better company.”</p><p>“I agree with the former. But not the latter.”</p><p>They grinned at one another and locked eyes, and the last of her defenses fell and she didn’t want to look away, not ever, ever again.</p><p>She didn’t see the dirt now. She didn’t notice the paunch or the three-day old beard or the sad, beaten, world-weary spirit. In her mind, she kissed his scar and it melted away, leaving only the unprepossessing, appealing face that had drawn her in the moment she’d seen it in unguarded repose in the prison transport holding cell on Earth, while Vila had pocketed its owner’s watch only to return it right after, because that’s the kind of face Blake had — one that gently caught you out in your selfishness and somehow made you want to be a less terrible person than you had been before.</p><p>She knew that he was aware he had this effect on people. His persuasiveness and magnetism were traits he consciously used to his advantage. The more the Federation had buried the headlines, suppressed the rhetoric, denied the man himself — the more the public had been inspired by Blake and his exploits on the <em> Liberator </em> . And the more he had rallied and galvanised his crew, the more they had done for him. For <em>him</em>, not his cause, not for any political zealotry or idea of some greater good and a better tomorrow. Because, while not a single one of them would have admitted it in the hard light of day, they had all loved him. That was Blake’s true talent. Even when he was at his imperious worst and you wanted to throttle him, you still, deep down, wanted his approval. And the times he was able to pull himself out of his own deafening thoughts to really <em>listen</em> to you and then consider applying your solution to some problem, the woozy warmth of that validation was better than any week at a vita-particle resort.</p><p>It was a singular allure that Blake had, and right now Jenna acutely felt its focus on her. It was the most flattering thing in the universe to have Blake’s full attention. It was also undeniably arousing.</p><p>“I wish you’d tried to find me,” she said, before she could stop herself. “We could have used one another.”</p><p>“In retrospect, that probably would have been a better idea.”</p><p>The anodyne reply grated Jenna. “I want to know why you’d think that.”</p><p>He narrowed his eyes thoughtfully, looking a little pained. Whatever it was he wanted to say, it clearly wasn’t coming easily.</p><p>“Spit it out, Blake.”</p><p>“I — ahh, all right. You and I were the best team on the <em> Liberator </em>. Always. And I’d lost sight of that near the end. I left you out too many times.”</p><p>“Damn right. Once I almost set up a bed in the teleport room, just to make a point.”</p><p>“You would have been right to. I was possibly being a chauvinist.”</p><p>“Just so we’re clear, I did everything you did but better and in stacked boots.”</p><p>He laughed, loud and clear, genuinely delighted. For a second, she glimpsed the Old Blake, far quicker and more generous with his mirth.</p><p>“I would never argue against that.”</p><p>“Did you value me less?” she asked him.</p><p>“No.” The grin faded.</p><p>“Did you want to protect me?”</p><p>“Maybe.”</p><p>“More than the others?”</p><p>He grasped for words, found none except her name.</p><p>She finished her second beer and rolled the bottle into a corner. “I felt hard done by you, you know. Maybe I still do.”</p><p>“I’ve many failings in my life, Jenna, but making you feel that way is one of the biggest.”</p><p>“I’m tired, Blake. And I feel old.”</p><p>“My god,” he snorted, “you’re still younger than I was when we met, do you know that?”</p><p>“Too old,” she talked over him, “to have any patience for coyness and half-truths. I’d thought I’d moved on from you, from the <em> Liberator </em>, but the truth is that when I got the first credible information that you may actually be alive, it punched a hole in everything and I couldn’t patch it up by without finding out if it were true. So I came here. And I promise you that if I hadn’t found you I would have given you up for good.”</p><p>“But you did find me. So now what?”</p><p>The teasing expression on his face simultaneously made her teeth grind and her pelvis thrum. “That depends.”</p><p>He licked his lips, leaned forward a little, firmly holding her gaze in his warm, imperfect eyes.</p><p>“On what?”</p><p>“Your telling the truth, for one.”</p><p>“I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”</p><p>“Fine.” Her eyes dropped to the bare part of his chest, then to his thick belt, and below. She purposefully stared there, unflinching. It felt thrillingly rude. “<em>Now</em> you may tell me why you never tried to sleep with me.”</p><p>He blinked. “Who says I didn’t?”</p><p>“You can’t lie to me right now,” she said, raising her chin at him and cocking an eyebrow. Knocking him off balance was exhilarating. “I forbid it.”</p><p>His cagy, cloaked expression fell. He sucked in his lips and swallowed hard. “I see.”</p><p>“Do you, Blake?” She tilted her head. Raked her eyes over him. <em>I dare you.</em></p><p>“Yes... I think so.” Slowly, he slid closer till he was beside her, their shoulders just touching. She felt the warmth, the great solidity of him through the leather of her jacket, the pressure of his touch pressing and retreating with each measured breath he took.</p><p>She turned her head to face him, and he did the same, the lantern light glittering in the big dark pupil of his good eye, while shadowing the scar across the other. He flicked his gaze to her lips, then back to her eyes. Heat surged through her pelvis in teasing spasms.</p><p>“Your answer.”</p><p>His breath feathered her nose. “I was afraid.”</p><p>“Of?”</p><p>“Of you.” Their hands palmed the floor beside one another, and his fingers grazed hers. “Of sex. Of everything that could have come with it.”</p><p>“Like?”</p><p>“Come on, Jenna. You know what I’m saying.”</p><p>“Pretend I don’t. Just say it. Things aren’t the same now. There’s no reason to hold anything back.”</p><p>“Now there, you’re wrong.”</p><p>“Regardless, my patience is nearly gone and I have the keys to your flyer.”</p><p>He patted his pocket and capitulated with a wry grin. “Now I see Vila wasn’t the only one around with cunning fingers.”</p><p>“So?”</p><p>Blake sighed. He replied in a gentler voice, taking her hand in his, “So... I was broken. And I didn’t even have all the pieces. I had to figure out who I was. That took time and intense effort. It wasn’t pleasant, and I couldn’t bear the thought of involving anyone else when I was in that state of mind.”</p><p>“So it wasn’t just your messiah complex getting in the way.”</p><p>He ignored the jibe and shook his head, regretful but firm. “It wasn’t right.”</p><p>Jenna studied him hard. She breathed him in; she could practically smell the fear welling in him, but also the want. Things that made him so solidly real and flawed and human. She couldn’t decide if these things made her want to hold him or crush him.</p><p>“Has it been since?”</p><p>He frowned. “If you’re asking me if I’ve been with anyone since the <em> Liberator— </em>“</p><p>“Sex, Blake. <em>Sex</em>. Let’s not hide behind metaphors.”</p><p>He started, then sputtered, “All, right, fine. <em>Sex</em>. The answer is yes. But if you want to know if it meant anything, then no.”</p><p>“I wasn’t asking as much as that.”</p><p>He smiled warmly. “You said you wanted honesty.” He threaded his big, calloused fingers between hers. “Were you at least wondering?”</p><p>She brought her other hand to his forearm and smoothed it beneath the rolled up cuff of his sleeve. She slipped her fingers up to his bicep, and the masculine curve of hard muscle there cushioned beneath softer flesh drove a terrible need through her body.</p><p>“Possibly.”</p><p>He didn’t push her for more than that. Perhaps her touch had made him a little magnanimous. How Blake of him.</p><p>She leaned in closer, enough to close the gap between them and touch her nose to his cheek. He stiffened at first, then let out the breath he’d been holding and settled against her.</p><p>“Would it mean anything now?” she whispered.</p><p>“Oh, yes,” he sighed, eyes closed, mouth slightly open, and pressed his cheek to hers.</p><p>“Are you afraid now?” She breathed.</p><p>“Terrified.”</p><p>He rolled his head until their noses touched, then their lips.</p><p>The kiss was soft and slow at first, languid and exploratory. His mouth enveloped hers and he swallowed her into his wet heat. His hands cradled her face while his full lips rolled over hers, his whiskers scratching her chin.</p><p>She opened her mouth wide to him, and he melted into her all at once. He lapped at her tongue and slid his hands from her face to her shoulders and back, kneading the tight leather of her jacket hard enough to gather it into his fists.</p><p>She groped the ringleted hair at the base of his head with one hand while the other fingered hard at the bared clavicles of his chest beneath his loose shirt. He smelled warm and vital, and tasted even better — pure, distilled Roj <em>goddamned</em> Blake.</p><p>He broke the kiss and dropped his face to her neck, nipping at her earring on the way down. His lips crushed her jugular and for a quick, thrilling second, grazed his teeth against her pulse point. He trailed gape-mouthed kisses down to the hollow of her throat, where he nuzzled and licked at her.</p><p>She allowed him there for a moment before guiding his head back up so she could have at his mouth again. God, how she’d once thought of this so often — glutting herself on these luxurious lips of his. She could get lost here, she knew. He could swallow her whole, quick as you like.</p><p>And she would like, but in this moment it would be firmly on her terms.</p><p><em>Yes, firmly,</em> she thought, acutely aware in the moment of her proximity to his lap. Firmly, deeply, <em>thoroughly</em>.</p><p>Long ago, she would have wanted it slow with him. Tender, romantic. A lifetime ago — another person ago. The woman she'd been then wouldn’t have recognised the woman she was now. She may have only vaguely understood the things this woman wanted to do to this Blake.</p><p><em>I’ve got his life in my hands right now,</em> she thought a little feverishly. A devious and delicious notion began seducing her: <em>This is power. I can do anything I want with him.</em></p><p>As if in some typically uncanny response to her thoughts, he sighed into her mouth and deftly unfastened her holster belt. It fell the short distance from her hips to the ground, and her gun landed with a dangerous clatter. He was lucky; she hadn’t left it half-cocked this time.</p><p>She grabbed for his belt and, getting it open, pushed his heavy jerkin from his shoulders. He pulled it off the rest of the way and let it fall behind him, bringing his hands back to rest on either side of her now-unencumbered waist, so large they practically encircled her, the heat of them through the leather painfully, exquisitely arousing her as he squeezed her flanks.</p><p>Taking his lower lip in her teeth, she brought her fingers to the zipper of her jacket and drew it down, unhurried and deliberate. When it released, he brought his hands to her ribs, at first over the thin fabric of her shirt, then beneath it. His strong fingers teased at her bra. He lightly toyed with the tiny lace at the edges of the cups, while firmly working his tongue in her mouth.</p><p>His cautious touches along her undergarment made her suddenly teem with annoyance. As long as she’d known him he’d been reckless, both with his own safety and that of everyone else’s around him. <em>That</em> was what she needed from him now.</p><p>She peeled off her jacket, heavy with his gun tucked into the inside pocket, and laid it beside her. She raised up on her knees and pulled him closer and straddled his lap. Slowly, she lowered herself onto the hard heat of him, his thickness evident even through their clothing. Pleased that so far reality matched her imagination, she tilted her hips forward and rubbed herself against him towards his waist. He groaned in her mouth, and she did it again.</p><p>He gripped her arse in his hands and squeezed hard. If it hadn’t been for the leather, it may have hurt. She regretted the barrier, and then she regretted his shirt. She yanked where it was loosely tucked into his waistband, and, once free, pulled it over his head.</p><p>His shoulders and chest were pale in the lamplight, so much paler than the rest of what she’d seen of him up till now and it felt like discovering a secret. The hard angles of his clavicles stood in relief to the vulnerable, dark hollows below them, and just below that spot on his left was the scar from Travis’ lazeron. She touched him there, instinctively pushing her fingertips into the deep, delicate recess of the old wound. He watched her, passive, as she fondled the pockmarks and ragged edges of badly healed tissue.</p><p>“It doesn’t hurt,” he murmured, though he gasped slightly as she pressed her fingers harder into the dimpled center of the cicatrix. He grabbed her wrist then, but didn’t push her away. She recognised the flush of fresh lust in his expression, and she ached for him, for his body, deep inside her. She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his scar with a gentleness that belied a baying baser instinct.</p><p>He kissed her forehead, stroked her hair, then tilted his head down to where he could catch her lips again in his. Working his jaw, he opened her mouth wide and stroked her tongue with his and, stars almighty, she’d always known he’d be good at this.</p><p>Panting into her mouth, he cupped her breasts in his hands through her shirt and thumbed at her nipples. They were unbearably sensitive to his touch, and the silken material rubbing against them felt splendid, but she craved for it to be his tongue, his lips, his teeth, working them raw.</p><p>She ground into his firmness, and he pushed against her in return. He was even harder now, and bigger, and she was going to have bruises down there later, she knew it, and almost laughed at the thought of it.</p><p>He broke their kiss and touched a finger to her chin, an uncertain smile tugging at his mouth. “What’s so funny?” he whispered.</p><p>The intensity of his glassy gaze nearly brought her to laughter again. She shook her head and tried to smother her grin. “Nothing.”</p><p>“Are you sure?”</p><p>She snaked a hand down between them and groped his length as best she could through his clothes. God, he was thick. She hadn’t lied to him; there was nothing at all to laugh at about <em>this</em>.</p><p>“Oh, yes.”</p><p>He sank his lips back over hers and the dingy walls and dark corners of the cabin blurred away until there was only him, his hands grasping her hips, the clothed but unmistakable definition of his cock in her palm, the rasp of his uneven breaths and her own gasp of surprise when he pushed her onto her back and mounted her.</p><p>Hands on either side of her head, he thrust himself between her legs and ground against her, as if he could push the bluntness of his still-confined cock into her and fuck her through their clothing.</p><p>It both stoked and infuriated her. If he thought this was how it was going to go, he was gravely mistaken. She hooked her legs around his waist and, in a move that would have made Cally proud, swiftly reversed their positions.</p><p>He was a sturdy man, generous in mass (more so now than before, and the extra weight made him feel even more seductively solid and <em>real</em> beneath her), and her hips stretched to straddle him. His initial alarm at her move quickly morphed into rapt enthusiasm once she reached down to open the top button of his trousers. He tried grasping at the fastening of hers in return, but she roughly pushed his hands away. At first amused, he tried again, and again she knocked him away.</p><p>He groaned a little in frustration and the sound of it crackled heat down her spine. She pushed her fingers beneath his waistband and lightly teased at the wiry hair there.</p><p>Blake breathed in sharply when she grazed a fingernail against the base of his cock. When he tried to settle his hands against her thighs, she twisted them away with her free hand.</p><p>He looked up at her imploringly. “Please, Jenna, let me touch you.”</p><p>She slid her hand back out from under his pants and tweaked his soft nipples until they, too, grew hard. She leaned down and took one hot little nub into her mouth, grazing the puckered little areola with her teeth.</p><p>“<em>Please</em>,” he said again, “I don’t want to just lie here.”</p><p>She pinned his wrists on either side of his head. “Shut up.”</p><p>“But I want to make you feel good. I want—”</p><p>“Blake, there are better things you can do with your mouth right now than talk.”</p><p>He stared at her for a moment as if getting the measure of her, then dropped his eyes to her breasts. He flickered his gaze a few times between them and her eyes, still uncertain. With an impatient huff, she pulled off her shirt and dropped it to the floor on top of her jacket.</p><p>Her bra was thin, nearly transparent, and he stared hard at her peaked nipples through the fabric. He avidly watched as she reached to her back, undid the hook, and let the bra slip down her shoulders and arms until it came to rest on his stomach. She flicked it away, smoothed her hands over his fleshy chest, and rolled one of his nipples between her thumb and forefinger.</p><p>He looked satisfactorily pained at the sight of her breasts she’d forbidden him to touch. He squirmed a little beneath her and made a low growling sound that shot an involuntary shudder through her cunt. She ached with the need for him to fill her with as much as he could give her. She was wet with the anticipation of it and wanted him to know.</p><p>She leaned over to bring one breast to his mouth, slack-jawed and open with want. In the lantern light, his eyes were glazed, the pupils blown wide. She brushed her nipple against his lower lip, then dipped it into his waiting mouth, where his tongue eagerly laved at her sensitive tip. He suckled her, gently at first, then harder as she reached for his waistband again. His cock bulged through his clothing, hard and hot against her center, and a fresh flood of wetness slicked her underwear. Her own frustration was becoming too great to be pleasurable any longer.</p><p>She slipped her breast from his mouth and coaxed him back up so that he was seated upright with her in his lap. His lips were red and swollen like a wound and she wanted them where she burned for his touch.</p><p>The trousers had to come off, <em>now</em>. Bracing her hands against his shoulders, she pushed herself to a standing position so she could more easily get hers off, but as she pulled away from him an unexpected wave of sadness overcame her. She stood a little ways back from him, despite feeling nearly sick with desire for him.</p><p>“You shouldn’t have gone,” she heard herself say. The rims of her eyelids burned. Refusing to look at him, she crossed her arms over her breasts and stared out the window. The darkness outside only reflected back to her own silhouette, backlit by the lantern.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” Blake whispered behind her.</p><p>“No, you aren’t. It was the worst thing you could have done and you aren’t sorry at all.”</p><p>
  <em> “Jenna.” </em>
</p><p><em>“Don’t</em> say anything, Blake. Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.”</p><p>“All right — fine, I can’t say anything to make it better or change what happened. But I <em>am</em> sorry because now I know how much it hurt you.”</p><p>“Not just me.”</p><p>“I don’t care about anyone else.”</p><p>She turned back to face him. “The Blake I knew would have.”</p><p>“I’m not him, Jenna. Not anymore.”</p><p>His voice trembled with such harsh conviction that she had no trouble believing him. She wasn’t the Jenna he’d known anymore, either, but knowing that didn’t quell the resentment that welled back up in her again. What the hell had it all been for, if it had only led to this?</p><p>“Then you really are dead.” She swept her jacket off the floor and shoved her arms into the sleeves, then grabbed for her gun belt before even zipping up.</p><p>She expected him to grab her again, to physically stop her, but he was motionless. When she looked down at him on the floor, expecting the same baleful, pitiful look from him she’d seen earlier, she saw something else entirely: a brazen, cunning, single-minded intelligence, brimming with a self-assurance she hadn’t seen in anyone’s face at all since Blake himself the moment they had found Star One.</p><p>“On the contrary,” he rumbled in the deep baritone he used when being particularly assertive. “Let me show you how alive I am.”</p><p>In perverse contradiction to his tone, he got to his knees and slid on the floor over to her, his expression still proud in this suppliant pose. “Let me.”</p><p><em>Yes,</em> Jenna thought, <em>perhaps I have found what I need here after all.</em></p><p>She carefully set her gun belt back down behind her, out of his immediate reach, and flicked open the top button of her trousers. His eyes stayed on hers.</p><p>She pulled the short zipper down, laid open the soft flaps of the leather, and his eyes stayed on hers.</p><p>She pulled off one boot, then the other. Hooked her thumbs into her trousers and underwear and pulled them halfway down her hips, just beneath the juts of bone, to where her smooth skin gave way to fair curly hair.</p><p>Still, his eyes remained on hers. She returned the stare, noting that the colour of his irises (which were as changeable as he was — sometimes brown, sometimes green, always elusive) had gone as black as the intentions she had for him.</p><p>He smiled a little, poised but hungry. A little insouciant. She could come all over that face and make him beg her for more, beg her for his own release then beg her to stay, and then she could walk out and fly away and never, ever look back again.</p><p>She was at the edge of a great precipice, looking down into the chasm with the wind howling at her back, and she thrilled at seeing just how far her control could extend before it could no longer hold her. For as long as she could remember, she had always relished risk, loved danger. Nothing ever made her feel more alive than glimpsing the beckoning face of death and evading it yet another more time.</p><p>Now that beckoning face was Blake’s, nearly unrecognisable at first in its disfigurement but unmistakable now in its seductive expression of conviction. The fleeting thought came to Jenna perhaps this was what Travis had seen in Blake, too; what had driven him to chase to his death this man, this ghost, this dead and unburied past — that twisted desire for control with the simultaneous need for capricious risk.</p><p>“Please,” whispered Blake, still on his knees, his eyes still on hers.</p><p>Jenna slipped the leather and her underwear the rest of the way off. The cold night air in the unheated shack raised the hairs on her bare skin and turned her thighs to gooseflesh. She stifled a shiver.</p><p>Blake held her gaze, leaned close, and softly kissed the small rise of her abdomen. The heat of his lips coupled with the rough brush of his nascent moustache on her skin made her shudder in earnest.</p><p>He brought his hands to her thighs and she let him rub some warmth into them. He exhaled a long, hot breath into the light hair between her legs, then kissed her there, too. Then again.</p><p>Just when his featherlight nuzzling was about to drive her to frustration, he slid his hands around to her arse and pushed his face deep between her legs. She arched her back and tilted her hips enough to unveil her swollen clit to his eager lips.</p><p>He sighed, almost as if in relief, and fluttered his tongue over her hard nub. It was too much and yet not enough, and the warring physical signals nearly caused Jenna to pull back until Blake switched to slower, longer flat strokes that eased her into deep and heady pleasure.</p><p>She’d always imagined he’d be particularly good at this, too, but his concentrated, devoted efforts somehow managed to exceed even her most inspired fantasies. She opened her stance and spread her legs for him, and he brought his thumbs round to open her lips to his.</p><p>She regretted his stubble now a bit more than before, but he was more than making up for that with the soft, slick, fleshy parts of him that caressed and sucked and licked up into her. His cheeks had flushed bright red, and his mouth and chin were soaking wet with her, and he’d finally, finally closed his eyes, so she could properly enjoy the cresting orgasm that threatened to drench his face without the awareness of him staring at her as it happened.</p><p>And then it did happen, faster and far more intense than she’d expected. Just as he’d been teasing his tongue on her clit and a thumb at her entrance, she’d abruptly clenched and cried out and spilled into his mouth. Wave after wave of pleasure crashed over her and she unthinkingly grabbed his head in her hands and pushed his prickly face hard into her throbbing centre until the blinding euphoria and rolling spasms began to slow and ease off.</p><p>He sank to the floor to catch his breath and when he looked up at her again, it was with an expression of... admiration? Pride? Not for himself — rather, for her. It seemed a bizarre and puzzling reaction to having just had one’s face practically frotted upon by someone who mere minutes before had threatened him death by energy weapon, but Jenna was utterly done trying to figure Blake out.</p><p>She felt cold once again, and exposed, the ecstatic warmth of orgasm quickly fading.</p><p>“What are you gloating about? she muttered.</p><p>“Oh, I’m not saying anything to ruin this moment.”</p><p>Jenna grunted in response and swept up her trousers from the floor.</p><p>Blake frowned as she separated her underwear from the leather. “Wait. Is that really it, then?”</p><p>“I thought you weren’t saying anything to ruin the moment.”</p><p>He wiped his face on his arm. “Apparently it already is. So that’s it? You’re leaving?”</p><p>“Blake, I don’t owe you anything.” She felt old again, and tired.</p><p>“I never said you did!”</p><p>“You never said a lot of things.” She slipped into her underwear.</p><p>He looked confused, defeated. As if the idea she would let him in just to push him right back out had never once occurred to him — that she could use him like some bloke in a bar and then walk out just as easily likely seemed as impossible an idea to him as any undrugged and uncoerced vote for government-sponsored oppression.</p><p>“Perhaps you should have shared your plans with us a bit more. Trusted us enough to trust you in return.” She stepped into her trousers and pulled them up.</p><p>“You’re right.” He stood up, hands at his sides. “You’ve always been right. So please, Jenna, don’t go. Not like this.”</p><p>She did up her flies and zipped up her jacket. “What did you expect?”</p><p>He sighed and drooped his rounded shoulders. “A chance to show you how I feel about you, I suppose. For one.”</p><p>She looked into the abyss and it looked back at her with shining amber eyes, one nearly scarred shut.</p><p>“It’s too late, I told you. I’m sorry.” And she was sorry. Just not enough to stay and lose herself all over again.</p><p>He smiled a little sadly and stepped back from her. He found his shirt and pulled it over his head as she fastened her gun belt to her hips.</p><p>How unremarkable he suddenly seemed in just his shirt and trousers. How... ordinary. Diminished by his scars and his rumpled, dirty clothes and his marred, muddy ethics. Just a man, like any other, on this bleak hell of a planet.</p><p>Just a man, surrounded by criminals, without a ship, nor, it seemed, much luck at all.</p><p>And in that moment, Jenna knew with complete certainty, with neither hope nor doubt, that Blake was never going to win. That it was simply impossible. And that he probably knew it, too.</p><p>She pulled her hair from inside the collar of her jacket and checked her weapons. She found Blake’s handgun in her pocket and handed it back to him.</p><p>He wasn’t going to win, but Jenna wanted him to have every chance he could get in his favour beforehand. “I saw the amount of payload you’re moving in the hangar I met you in,” she said, “and I imagine that’s not nearly all of it.”</p><p>He shrugged. “It’s not that much. Food, mainly. Some medical supplies.”</p><p>“But mostly guns. I know what munition cases look like, you know.”</p><p>“Some guns, certainly,” he admitted. “And a few other things.”</p><p>“You’ve got more than just this base here on Gauda Prime, don’t you?”</p><p>“Not really,” he squinted. “Not yet. But we have hope.”</p><p><em>Hope</em>. She had always thought it a silly word for a silly concept. Hope wasn’t anything you could rely upon, like a good and well-maintained ship. Hope could even be dangerous; it could make people do stupid things and make poor decisions. But this time, the decision it made was hers.</p><p>“That blockade’s preventing you from getting and receiving supplies. It’s keeping you disconnected and underfunded and ineffective.”</p><p>“I’m sure that’s the point of it.”</p><p>“Have any runners?”</p><p>“A few.”</p><p>“<em>Good</em> ones?”</p><p>He grimaced.</p><p>“I didn’t think so.” She tossed him the keys to his flyer. “Take me back to my ship and I’ll take your guns for you.”</p><p>“No. Absolutely not.”</p><p>“I’m leaving either way, blockade or no. I have a better chance of getting through than anyone else you know, so I may as well take your guns with me.”</p><p>Blake grimaced again, but Jenna could tell he was running the variables in his head. Eventually he nodded. “You’ve just got to understand that I would never ask this of you—”</p><p>“You’re not asking me; I’m telling you. Now get dressed and get me back to my ship.”</p><p> </p><p>***</p><p> </p><p>The last of the cargo was loaded into every available storage space on <em>Aquila</em> (no flight clearance meant no flight manifest, which meant no need to restrict contraband to only the smuggling holds — if only things could always be this simple), and the ship would be flying at the highest weight level it could safely handle. The extra weight would make it a bit more of a challenge to skip between the gunships and dodge their fire, but <em>Aquila</em> would get Jenna through, just as she’d always done.</p><p>Blake was leaning against the rear bulkhead to the small flight deck, watching Jenna run through her startup sequence. It took much more time than on the <em> Liberator </em> , but less automatics meant more direct pilot control, which was preferable to Jenna because it was also <em>much</em> more fun.</p><p>“Right. Well, that’s that,” she said from her chair, completing all the final checks. “If you don’t get off now, you’ll be part of the cargo.”</p><p>“It’s very tempting.”</p><p>“Unfortunately, you’d exceed our weight limit. I’d have to jettison you to break orbit.”</p><p>“Ah, well,” he grunted, pushing himself from the bulkhead. “Then it’s a good thing there are things I can do here instead.”</p><p>They shared an awkward smile. If she really never did see him again, she would miss his face, no matter the state of it.</p><p>“Have you thought about what you’ll do next?” she asked.</p><p>“Oh... blow something up, I’m sure. Sell a few more bounties to pay for the explosives. You never know,” he said breezily, “perhaps even Avon will show up.”</p><p>“I really hope not.”</p><p>He laughed, then recognised she was being serious. “Yes, well,” he cleared his throat, “I suppose this is goodbye.”</p><p>“It is, and I don’t want to draw it out.”</p><p>She knew may never leave otherwise. But her words had sounded harsh even to her own ears, so she stood to give him a final hug. In response, he wrapped his arms around her so tightly she couldn’t move.</p><p>“Blake — Blake, I can’t breathe, let go,” she laughed, beating her fists against his broad shoulders.</p><p>He gave her one last squeeze and kissed her cheek. “For luck,” he insisted before she could even halfway fix him a look of disapproval. And then he was gone, out to the tarmac and the lawless wilds of the place he’d chosen to be the first page of his next chapter of inciting revolution with incurable idealism.</p><p>The power of <em>Aquila’s</em> engines pressed Jenna hard to her seat and rattled the harness that belted her in. The night sky gave way to the gauzy airglow of Gauda Prime’s atmosphere, then, once she’d broken free of the planet’s gravity, to the inky black of extraorbital space. After the turbulence of liftoff, reaching the quiet and perfect stillness of open space had always given her the greatest sense of serenity, of clarity — this time, it seemed, more so than ever before.</p><p>The blips of the gunships appeared on her scanner, right where she knew they’d be, and they immediately locked on to her trajectory in pursuit. Jenna primed her blasters for firing, gripped the yoke with determination, and gazed at the vast canvas of stars surrounding her and knew that she’d never belonged anywhere else but amongst them.</p><p>
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